This year has been trying for climate scientists and environmentalists who have been trying hard to explain away the 17-year hiatus in global warming and link “extreme weather” to rising greenhouse gas emissions — despite strong evidence to the contrary. There has been a breakdown in the manmade global warming consensus, and some even argue we are headed for an ice age.

In honor of the 17th year without global warming, The Daily Caller News Foundation has put together seven setbacks for global warming alarmism.

2) During the second week in December, the U.S. saw more than 2000 record low temperatures and record snowfalls, according to the National Weather Service and HamWeather records center. There were 606 record low temperatures, 1,234 low maximum temperatures and 285 record snowfalls across the country. In the meantime there were only 98 high temperature records and 141 high minimum temperature records.

3) Satellite data shows that the polar bears have at least one reason to be happy this year – Arctic sea ice coverage was up 50 percent over last year’s record low coverage. Contrary to Al Gore’s prediction that there would be no polar ice cap by this year, sea ice coverage spanned nearly 2,100 cubic miles by the end of this year’s melting season, up from about 1,400 cubic last year.

4) Global cooling is on the way, according to an increasing number of scientists. German scientists have predicted that based on declining sunspot activity and natural climate oscillation the world will cool over the next century. Temperatures will eventually drop to levels corresponding with the “little ice age” of 1870.

5) Other scientists have also been coming around to the global cooling side of things. The BBC reported that Professor Mike Lockwood of the Reading University predicts that at the current rate of decline in solar activity, another “Little Ice Age” could envelope Northern Europe.

“Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean,” Lindzen said. “However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans.”

“It is misleading and just plain incorrect to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally,” Pielke said. “It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.”

The other witnesses on the panel did not refute Pielke’s data.

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. And when he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet, and as a result he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist that takes no prisoners.